Churches, Authorities Knew of Abuse: Crews

SBS
February 27, 2014

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/02/27/churches-authorities-knew-abuse-crews

Churches, the Salvation Army and authorities have known for 40 years about the abuse coming to light at a royal commission, a prominent Sydney reverend says.

"They all knew," Wayside Chapel's Reverend Bill Crews told AAP. "There's no institution or organisation, whether it's the church or the government or NGOs, who can claim they didn't know."

But they were more concerned about "protecting the good name of the institution" than the abused children.

Between 1971 and 1983, Rev Crews ran a crisis centre in Kings Cross, where many street kids came for help.

That's where he first met Mary Hooker.

She was raped and beaten as a 13-year-old girl while living at a state-run home in 1972, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard on Thursday.

Rev Crews remembers Ms Hooker telling the same story at Kings Cross during the 1970s.

"I was telling people all of this," he told AAP.

"They can't say they didn't know. I used to go out to public meetings and talk about it. I used to ring them up, the various church authorities.

"All of this was common talk, around everywhere."

Rev Crews says he was routinely told to keep quiet by the hierarchy of the various churches, the Salvation Army and others alleged to be complicit in the abuse, if he received any response at all.

He says the children were abused because they were easy targets, usually without parents or from broken homes.

Nothing was done about their claims of abuse "because there was a general not wanting to know about those children", Rev Crews said.

"In lots of ways, they blamed the kids."